elk

Oh, humanity, you're a real piece of work. When we're not callously wiping out an entire species of animal through overhunting or habitat destruction, it turns out we're scaring the living daylights out of them. During a year-long study of elk in southwestern Alberta, a research party led by Simone Ciuti from the University of Alberta noticed that the presence of humans left the elk more on edge than the presence of their natural predators, like bears and wolves. The elk seemed particularly put off by humans in vehicles, though it seems fair to assume that bears and wolves driving ATVs would have left them equally unnerved.
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